Thinking "Out of the Box"

Sometimes I get inspiration from the funniest things, out of no where. I was walking through Michael's and saw a whole pack of gift bags with handles. There must have been 15 bags in the bundle.

I immediately thought to myself, MINI ALBUM!! I imagined keeping the front and back page with the handles on and cutting the handles off the middle bags. So I brought them with me recently to a weekend crop and started working on them. It's a work in progress but I wanted to show you what I've come up with so far...those empty bags have become this...


I found scrapbook paper pack called "Vintage Collage Stack" also at Michael's and I did a lot of precise cutting out of images for the bags plus liberally used Prima flowers and lots of Tim Holtz inks. The backs, where I will be putting my pictures are looking like these..

I'm not sure how I'm going to attach it all at this point or if I will use the inside of the bags as well but as I said, it's a work in progress.
I just wanted to show you that you don't have to always spend a lot of money buying an album and can sometimes find some objects in stores that you can alter into something very useable and pretty. I'll show you it when I finish it so you can see how it turned out! Just do a little thinking outside the box!